'Rust Belt Chic' warms to scruffy, problematic Cleveland

View full sizeGarie WaltzerA clapboard house on West 17th Street sits on the lip of an industrial landscape photographed last year from the Lorain-Carnegie (Hope Memorial) Bridge. The picture is featured in the anthology "Rust Belt Chic."

When Joyce Brabner coined the term "Rust Belt Chic" some 20 years ago, she was hissing, not smiling.

The widow of Harvey Pekar said Thursday that long decades of condescension curdled her patience for "the anorexic vampires" from New York and MTV who flew in to mock-interview Pekar, and treat Cleveland like a blue-collar amusement park.

"We're just basically these little pulsating jugular veins waiting for [the vampires] to leech off some of our nice, homey, backwards Cleveland stuff," Brabner said in 1992, a kiss-off that included the first known reference to "Rust Belt Chic."

Her defiance is quoted by urban planner Richey Piiparinen in the opening essay of "Rust Belt Chic," an anthology that he and Oberlin professor Anne Trubek created over the summer at a blistering pace. They self-published the collection this fall.

Goaded by pronouncements from tourist-y journalists from NPR, Salon and the Atlantic, Trubek used social media and networked over three weeks to recruit some 50 Northeast Ohio writers and artists to mull the region themselves.

She and Piiparinen were keen to assemble a Cleveland snapshot that felt more authentic to them: No mindless boosterism or "ruins porn," that artistic fetish for fallen-down manufacturing towns. "Rust Belt Chic" reads like a rebuttal to Richard Florida's argument for Creative Class cool filling cities with young elites.

So contributors such as poet Dave Lucas, novelist Claire McMillan, politician Jim Rokakis and newcomer Huda Al-Marashi wrote short commentary that celebrated scruffy, unsung, conflicted Cleveland. Connie Schultz put in a piece about her Ashtabula childhood.

Eric Anderson, a former surveyor at LTV and U.S. Steel, takes up gentrification in the bittersweet "Pretty Things to Hang on the Wall," arguing "The first sign of the coming apocalypse is the art walk." And Al-Marashi contributes a revelatory piece, "Cleveland's Little Iraq," that describes how her Arabic and her ability to buy halal meat have thrived here in ways it didn't in Southern California and New York.

No contributor to "Rust Belt Chic" was paid; the enterprise resembled a pop-up civic action. Piiparinen, 36, said he and Trubek put up $6,000 of their own money to print copies.

The editors see it as a book about "failure, conflict, growth and renewal," declaring that "the result is not pretty or shiny, but it is beautiful."

Professor Claudia Coulton directs the Case Western Reserve University Center for Urban Poverty and Community, where Piiparinen is a researcher. She said she was intrigued by the way he represents "the next generation -- people who are now engaging in the discourse who are not necessarily publishing their ideas in academia, or in the traditional ways."

At the University of Akron, professor David Giffels was mildly surprised to see the collection in print. "I gave it less than a 50-50 shot."

Giffels, who contributed a Browns Stadium essay called "The Lake Effect," had been weighing the Rust Belt for his own forthcoming book. Being contacted by Trubek, he said, was kismet.

"This is a place specifically -- and a region generally -- that is usually ignored, and most often misunderstood," Giffels said. "So we have this instinct to explain ourselves. And we also bristle when somebody else tries to explain us, explain Ohio, like during a presidential campaign."

In "The Lake Effect," Giffels writes of attending his first Browns game in 1981: "I had no idea that the entire crowd would be dressed like some hybrid of a Dickens backstreet throng and a post-apocalyptic hunting party. Here, camouflage was the mark of a Sunday dandy."

At the other end of the anthology, McMillan describes "The Seriousness of Vintage," as in clothing. A transplant from San Francisco a decade ago, she writes: "These coats and shoes are symbolically Cleveland to me. Superb quality, practical, not flashy, pretty in a ladylike way with a sporty air so you can move and get things done."

In Manhattan, she reports, identical garments sell at tenfold the price.

But Jimi Izrael, 42, a radio commentator, isn't buying. His essay, titled "Not a Love Letter," is a dig at chef Michael Symon's "Love Letter to Cleveland," which appeared in May on the Huffington Post.

"I have never, ever met any single person of color with any great passion for the city," writes Izrael. He compares Cleveland to "a nasty chick on the front end of a gambling problem without a clue. Reluctant family that I'd deny if I could, but I can't. She's my baby mama."

Piiparinen said the anthology "is a difficult book because it is Cleveland, where there are a lot of problems."

Some of these difficulties seem familiar in other places. Denise Grollmus, who contributed "Speaking in Tongues" about her relationship with a punk rock club on West 44th Street and Lorain Avenue, is in Poland now, where she is toying with the notion of "Rust Belt Chic: The Warsaw Edition."

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